Researchers Control Movement of Electrons through Quantum Ping Pong

Researchers at the Cambridge University have managed a major breakthrough that can pave the way for Quantum Computing.

The researchers have managed to control the path of an electron travelling in an electronic circuit, which is a big deal.

Electrons usually travel in a very zigzag manner and take a lot of detours before reaching where they are intended to reach, thereby dropping the information they carrying.

The researchers controlled the electron by trapping it in a ‘quantum dot’, a small hole in a piece of gallium arsenide, on the surface. When the electron was trapped, the researchers created a channel of energy higher than the surrounding electrons resulting into another dot that was empty. Through burst of sound wave, electron was carried from one do to another on an acoustic wave. Similarly another burst sent the electron back.

“There is a lot of work going on worldwide to make this new type of computer, which may solve certain complex problems much faster than classical computers. However, little effort has yet been put into connecting up different components, such as processor and memory,” said Chris Ford of the Semiconductor Physics Group, notes the Register.

“Although our experiments do not yet show that electrons ‘remember’ their quantum state, this is likely to be the case. This would make the method of transfer a candidate for moving quantum bits of information (qubits) around a quantum circuit, in a quantum computer,” he added.